Two recent books delve into what it means to be a fan: Adrienne Trier-Bieniek’s edited collection, Fan Girls and the Media: Creating Characters, Consuming Culture (Rowan Littlefield 2015) and Paul Booth’s Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age (University of Iowa Press 2015). However, they take different pathways to the discussion, with Fan Girls focusing on … fangirls and Playing Fans looking at fandoms of mostly large media “fandom” properties.

Because Fan Girls and the Media is an edited collection, each essay varies in the scope of the fangirls at the center. These range from Star Trek fans to comedy fans to Twilight fans. But the most intriguing essay is Kishonna Gray’s Cultural Production and Digital Resilience: Examining Female Gamers’ Use of Social Media to Participate in Video Game Culture. This essay not only approaches the thorny issue of gendered norms in gaming, but also addresses related issues such as race and more broadly, the ways gaming can either enforce or move against structural oppression. If you are looking for more like this essay, I recommend Gray’s Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge 2014).

Playing Fans treads over ground much planted by earlier scholars like Henry Jenkins. However, this new take will be more interesting to kids of today, with updated examples. The two most intriguing examples have not previously been written about much in fan studies, focusing on what it means to be a fan of something and to instead be making fun of it (or both that the same time). The first of these sections focuses on Community’s Doctor Who parody Inspector Spacetime, which both mocks and admires Doctor Who and its fans. The other very interesting section focuses on prn parodies, explaining the need to stick to canonical elements within these quasi-fan films. Interestingly, Booth also connects these prn parodies to slash, drawing a connection between how both disturb established norms around relationships and sexuality.

However, both books do suffer from a lack of directional focus – is the focus on fans looking at media properties and speaking back or about how media properties are marketed to fans? Both directions are important, after all, there is a multidirectional flow of information, production, and pushback, but neither book explains this, instead primarily focusing on specific media and its fans. But this weakness can be supplemented or excused through other books and essays, so it isn’t in any way a fatal flaw. But the lack of critique of fan culture itself (outside of brief mentions of sexism and male fandom) within both of these books should definitely be noted.

Summary: Both books give an interesting perspective on the value of fandom. These books can be read together and would work well in a fandom studies/media studies syllabus.

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In 2008, a pre-publication book leaked onto the internet, three weeks before its release date. This book earned intense and polarized reactions from fans and critics alike following the leak, with many readers figuratively plugging fingers in their ears to ignore the cacophony. Even after the book was released, responses on social media–still a strange new concept–continued to grow around it unchecked and unsupervised by the people who had created the book in the first place.

That book was Breaking Dawn, the final installment of the much-maligned Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Depending on who you ask, its treatment on social media was either the reason for its success or the death knell of the series’ initial popularity. While there had been discussion around Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, and their interesting life choices, 2008 was a turning point for many book fans, in which readers weren’t just talking about books on their LiveJournals or listing them on MySpace, but speaking back to the text on social media.

In the nine years since Breaking Dawn, spoilers spread fast and furious through message boards and LJ communities, and social media has become the de-facto home for discussions of young adult (YA) fiction. Twitter, Goodreads, Tumblr: these are now the new camps for readers, authors, and the publishing industry to build…well, everything. Authors are “highly” encouraged to have a social media presence, the better to interact with fans and potential readers. Booksellers promote events and author visits via Twitter. Readers tag authors in posts, positive and negative.

Social media might be opening up avenues for YA authors, publishing industry members, and readers to connect in ways that are still expanding every day, but it is also bringing up questions around criticism and how critics function, specifically: can criticism of YA fiction be effective on social media, and what kind of effect does criticism have on the genre? It would be easy to dismiss the aforementioned social media spaces at first glance, but the last two years alone have propelled them to a necessary forum for anyone who has even a passing interest in the development of YA as a genre.

Historically, YA literature has been defined by certain characteristics more than an umbrella explanation. Usually protagonists are teenagers (between 13-19 years old), and plots revolve around the protagonist’s inner and external conflicts, but they are not guaranteed a “happy ending.” More often than not, these conflicts involve the trials of growing up, and what that looks like for a particular character in their particular situation. Not all of the characteristics cited above may be included in YA fiction titles today, and marketing strategies may choose to utilize the YA label for some middle-grade and adult titles.

The first YA novel to be termed such was Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly, published in 1942. Unlike YA authors today, Daly was never faced with the questions social media poses–her work was clearly separated from her personal life and views, and readers interacted only with the text, purchased from the bookstore or borrowed from the library. Today, writers converse with their readers sometimes a full year before their novel or short story is published, a feat made possible by the existence of Twitter, Tumblr, Goodreads, and yes even that trusty staple of the internet, email. Mutually beneficial relationships are built with each other: authors (especially those debuting) build a fandom who will be excited for and read their work, and readers have the pleasure of direct conversations with their favourite writers. Some writers choose not to create a social media presence, but in the world of star ratings and tweets, sometimes that doesn’t matter.

While Stephenie Meyer has never created a Twitter account, discussion of her series still abounds on social media, used as a standard for YA fiction, a throwaway insult, sometimes both at the same time. Intense academic criticism of the series text can appear next to an all-caps dismissal of Edward’s romantic foibles on Twitter sometimes simultaneously, inviting interaction from other readers and strangers looking for a conversation. Sometimes the analyses come from fellow authors as well. Criticism is a living thing, especially on social media, and for many, the format has muddled the lines between formalized literary criticism and crowdsourced opinion, to varying results.

“…not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean…[it] is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature.”

Purdue OWL provides a listing of some of the movements within literary criticism, including psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, and post-colonial criticism. These three movements have played a particular role in the development of literary theory for young adult fiction, influencing conversations that were previously conducted by masteral and doctoral students.

YA literary theory has existed since at least the 1970s, and developed through academic circles. With the rise of Twitter and Goodreads in the late 2000s, the concept of literary criticism began to move out of the realm of classrooms and theses, and into unmoderated online spheres. These online spheres don’t just see academic critics as participants in the conversation, but the very creators and consumers of YA literature as well. It hasn’t always been an easy or smooth transition, as few things are when it comes to the complexities of social interactions.

Social media opens literary criticism to readers, but the format limits formal access, at least in a the “academic” sense, to a collection of critical theory. 140 characters, threaded tweets, star ratings with comments–all of these encourage interaction that is peer-based but unreviewed in a lot of cases. YA’s growth as a genre depends increasingly on critics moving through social outlets, where they come into conflict with the community’s foundation of “kindness” and support. This opens dialogue up to direct and indirect tone policing of the loudest voices, in many cases in defense of white male authors.

Women populate the online YA community, both as creators and consumers, though men do make up 40% of the executive level of the publishing industry. It would almost be laughable how quickly the word “drama” has been attached to the community as a result of this, how easily legitimate criticism has been drowned out by cries to #KeepYAKind and more serious threats directed towards “exposing” critics as “bullies” to their agents and editors. More often than not, the “bullies” are simply writers themselves–many women of colour–academics, and sometimes teens themselves who come to understand the systems that are visible in the YA books that are published and promoted. Their involvement in criticism is not done out of hatred for the genre, but the complete opposite: they want YA to succeed, and to succeed constructively.

Dr. Debbie Reese has written about the representation of American Indians in hundreds of children’s books, and her reviews are some of the most highly respected in the YA community. Reese is enrolled in the Nambé Pueblo tribe, and holds a Ph.D. in education and a Master’s degree in library and information science, but her interaction with children’s literature includes interacting on social media. She is active on Twitter, often having nuanced conversations about diversity and Native stories daily, and providing an open dialogue for those who want to learn. I first found Reese’s work during the Twilight era of my reading life, as she has written extensively about the series’ portrayal of Native characters like Jacob Black.

Her presence hasn’t received all sunny support, however–there have been authors who took issue with Reese’s evaluation of their work, and readers who aren’t swayed by the points Reese makes or influenced by their perception of her tone on social media. Reese’s position is academic, but it runs parallel to fan activism, a concept described by Melissa Brough and Sangita Shresthova as something “most often [associated] with active fans lobbying for a content-related outcome, such as a program staying on the air, the representation of racial or sexual minorities, or the promotion of social themes in program content.” Interestingly enough, authors and readers are working together more and more to bring attention to critical discussions around YA literature.

A particularly loud recent outcry came from the promotion of a Harlequin Teen 2017 title, The Continent by Keira Drake. Several authors noticed worrying aspects, and Justina Ireland’s criticism of the text’s Native American and Japanese stereotypes quickly went viral on Twitter in November 2016, leading to a hastily cobbled apology from Drake. Fellow author Zoraida Cordova wrote a piece examining Drake’s apology and bringing up salient points regarding her world-building foundations. Ireland’s Twitter thread was followed by a blog post in which she discusses The Continent and Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth, and their perpetuating use of the “dark-skinned aggressor” trope.

In Debbie Reese’s case, her criticism and advocacy for fair and non-stereotypical Native representation in children’s literature is shored up by her decades of academic experience and credentials, and her message is shared through social channels, bringing the conversation to readers themselves. Fan activists likewise intersect with criticism via social media and public forums, where their voices are most loudly heard. While Justina Ireland and Zoraida Cordova might not be fan activists in the definition of the phrase, the critical work they do is buoyed by their presence and participation within social media. The conversation around The Continent would bring the title to Dr. Reese’s attention, and her in-depth critical analysis of the text supports the points that had been brought up on Twitter.

None of these very valid criticisms came from the hallowed halls of universities. They were built via tweet threads, through conversations with fellow authors, bloggers, and casual readers, on a forum that has also seen the harassment of people who choose to engage in constructive criticism. Their questions were amplified by social media, to a point where the publisher could not ignore it. HarlequinTEEN’s choice to delay the book’s publication was a polarizing one, but it would be hard to dispute the vital role played by these social media conversations in their decision. If nothing else, the discussion around The Continent proves three things: Constructive, critical work is happening on social media; this work does not go unnoticed by publishers; and it is effective in pushing for change in the industry, from readers to the highest executive.

The work continues: Veronica Roth’s highly anticipated Carve the Markwas criticized for some of the same tropes seen in The Continent, and Roth’s response to the criticisms is in itself indicative of the need for further conversations. It’s worth noting that Roth chose to respond on her Tumblr, to a question posed by an anonymous reader, instead of engaging with the authors/critics/bloggers that brought up the questions–worth noting not because it was a bad decision, but because it highlights the channels of interaction that are now available to even the most casual reader. Ask a question, and your favourite author might just answer it, tweet at you, reblog your query, respond to a review on your blog.

But as we move towards an arena where these critical lines are less clear, and the questions therein, it’s also worth considering how YA’s target audience–teens–fit into the picture, and what kind of online and offline space is provided to them, as consumers and budding critics of the genre. As we saw with the response to Breaking Dawn, teens are ready and willing to engage with their favourite books in the channels available to them, and just as able to make their own spaces through book blogs and other online media. Critics and creators need to match their growth and engagement to ensure YA’s continued development and innovation–who best to do that than the teens who consume YA fiction so enthusiastically?

This is the first of a two-part series on YA literary criticism and social media.

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A television show opens on the sound of rhythmic breathing accompanying a pursuit in the dark. Many viewers recognized the soundtrack right away: Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead,” a rather scathing punk-rap tackling “post-racial” America in both its lyrics and accompanying video imagery. Simultaneously, the runaway slave narrative is deconstructed and becomes familiar, West’s song giving a contemporary context to the often told plight of enslaved Black people risking it all for a chance at a free life.

This opening scene made a statement: Underground changes the story for what a slave narrative is because present audiences have seen Black cultural context become mainstream.

Given its graveness, slave narratives are often treated with a sombreness not always given to other subgenres. And given many contemporary criticisms that there are too many narratives focused on the United States’ history of slavery, Underground had to differentiate itself from past slave narratives that not only emphasized Black pain and suffering rather than humanity but also centered white savior narratives without acknowledging the truth of the full brutality about the history.

In this regard, AfroRetroFuturism provides a lens to understand the appeal of a show that puts people escaping enslavement in an action/adventure context, creating high stakes and using a contemporary mode of storytelling. A look at Nisi Shawl’s Everfair shows AfroRetroFuturism as a lens to consider and place African Americans in historical narratives in more complex ways just as Underground’s first season has shown.

What Is AfroRetroFuturism?

Nisi Shawl coined the term AfroRetroFuturism to describe her work Everfair, the steampunk fantasy novel set in an alternative Belgian Congo, since she did not consider her work as “Neo-Victorian.” She explains, “Afrofuturism is a movement focused on African contributions to, perspectives on, and presence in the future. Retrofuturism is what most steampunks call what they’re interested in: a re-visioning of the past including elements of its future and sometimes elements of our own future as well. AfroRetroFuturism is a combination of these attitudes and concerns.” She eschewed the Neo-Victorian term because she felt it focused only on alternate versions of the Victorian empire. In fact, she explains her inspiration behind the story: “I was inspired to write Everfair by my dislike of a genre I should have been completely crushed out on.”

However, Everfair focuses on a subject often overlooked in the genre: colonialism. Perhaps this is what Shawl felt was missing from steampunk, an honest remembrance of the atrocities that came along with this period of much celebrated innovation and technological advances. She explains, “The term ‘neo-Victorian,’ to me, is a much more limited one in that it’s apparently just about alternate versions of the Victorian empire.” While she deconstructs the neo-Victorian narrative, she acknowledges that steampunk “often works as a form of alternate history, showing us how small changes to what actually happened might have resulted in momentous differences: clockwork Victorian-era computers, commercial transcontinental dirigible lines, and a host of other wonders.” And Everfair does include these types of wonders: aircanoes, steam bicycles and mechanical prosthetic limbs abound throughout the novel.

But the novel also functions as wish fulfilling fantasy. As Shawl says in the novel’s brief introduction, “I like to think that with a nudge or two events might have played out much more happily for the inhabitants of Equatorial Africa. They might have enjoyed a prosperous future filled with all the technology that delights current steampunk fans in stories of western Europe and North America…. Of course steampunk is a form of fiction, and the events within these pages never happened. But they could have.”

While Shawl indulges the fantasy, she does not gloss over the atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo under the exploitation of Leopold II. She explains that an estimated half of the population disappeared between 1895 to 1908 during Leopold’s reign over the Congo Free State before his death in 1909, the year after he was forced to relinquish control of the colony. While an exact number is not given, estimates show that between two and 15 million people died. However, Shawl’s imagined resistance results in the “utopia” of Everfair, as part of the plan by Britons and African-American missionaries who buy the land, which has its own struggles and remnants of its freshly remembered colonial past. Of course, much of the story is based in reality; in fact, Shawl modeled many of the characters after real-life historical figures including Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston.

Shawl’s work addresses the forced labor and plundering of the resources of the land but focuses on those who fought Leopold’s Force Publique. She includes political intrigue, sexual intrigue and the combination of the two in ways that not only humanize the characters but also bring to light how resistance efforts against Leopold may have occurred at the time — with a steampunk twist. However, historians tout the Victorian Era (from 1837 to 1901) as a period of peace and prosperity, but it was anything but for those under the rule of colonialism and other oppressions including slavery. Works such as Underground disrupt that perception and remind us that peace and prosperity not only did not extend to all but also came at the expense of Black and brown people all over the world.

Underground as AfroRetroFuturism

This context of AfroRetroFuturism allows viewers to see a neglected aspect of the slave narrative: the resistance. Resistance comes in forms other than escape although the narrative of the Macon 7 provides the focal point of the first season. From the first episode, the viewer sees that Noah, the man on the run in the opening “Black Skinhead” sequence, has been planning an escape for some time. However, he knows he cannot do it alone; he needs a team to carry out a plan that helps ensure not only their escape but also their subsequent survival. This means he must find others whom he can trust and be willing to risk life and limb.

From here, the origins of the Macon 7 and those who present obstacles to them unfold. As with many stories of suspense and intrigue, alliances are formed, tested and broken. Underground has the feel of a fast-paced drama with constant tension in which even the most banal situations can mean the difference between life and death. While the show always keeps the historical context of the show in mind, it explicitly uses a contemporary “language” of filmmaking that makes the story feel more accessible to current political climates and acts of resistance.

This language extends to more than music and mise en scène. For instance, Noah’s use of elevated language paints him as a hero. In fact, other characters throughout the show use the same manner of speech, which makes them fit more into a contemporary context rather than what an audience might expect from a show set in the 1850s. While the entire setting sits squarely in the Victorian Era, one could just as easily imagine Noah and the rest of the Macon 7 among contemporary resistance movements whether taking place on college campuses or grassroots organizations, particularly those of few means and resources. They do not simply decide to run on a whim: they make calculated decisions and respond according to their circumstances, much like the 20th century Civil Rights Movements and more recent Black Lives Matter protests. Men such as Noah, Moses and Cato come across as charismatic leader types, and women such as Rosalee, Ernestine and Pearly Mae do much of the invisible work of resistance.

Love and Romance

The construction of love and romance also places Underground within an AfroRetroFuturism context. Many slave narratives never imagine this aspect of life for enslaved Black people. In many cases, sexual politics are addressed, much like with Harriet Jacobs’ narrative in which she finds sexual autonomy when she has children with a man she chooses after she realizes her slave master intends to have her as his own. Her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl chronicles her experience under slavery in which she “consents” to a relationship with a white neighbor, ultimately having two children with him, in hopes he would protect her from a cruel slave master and eventually gain freedom for herself and her children. In a way, the character Ernestine echoes Jacobs’ resistance through sexuality, but there is no romantic subtext in her relationship with Tom Macon.

Instead, we see Rosalee and Noah’s courtship from the beginning. Their mutual attraction is shown through long gazes emphasized by points of view shots from both characters. In a time when Black people had no legal right to personhood, following the conventions of romance plays into their resistance. In fact, the timing of Rosalee and Noah’s escape comes after Rosalee made the decision not to join the others in their escape plan, but is compelled to run when she thinks she has killed her would-be rapist.

Love and romantic relationships among oppressed people may also be seen as a form of resistance, particularly within a system that seeks to deny them the basic facets of humanity. So seeing Rosalee and Noah discuss his scars during a dance underscored by The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games,” a contemporary alternative R&B ballad, makes the romantic narrative familiar and helps the viewer imagine how loving (cishet) relationships could be among those considered property rather than human. This exchange prompts Noah to ask Rosalee to run away with him. Unfortunately, the love and romantic narrative between Pearly Mae and Moses is not as fully explored as their union is already solid at the beginning of the series and they both perish, leaving behind their traumatized daughter. Yet their plight shows the vulnerability of this type of relationship under systematic oppression.

Resistance Within the System

While Underground focuses on the escape of the Macon 7, other characters and subplots shows that resistance meant more than running. Ernestine, the head of the Macon house, has her own form of personal resistance, but it is limited because it only benefits her and her immediate family. Her influence comes from her role as Tom Macon’s sexual dominant in a BDSM relationship. (It also later comes to light that he sired two of her three children.) Ernestine manages to use the currency of that relationship to curry favor in other aspects of her life, most notably for her children.

When Tom’s wife insists that Ernestine’s youngest child James is almost ready to be put in the field, Ernestine uses her influence as a domme to make Tom promise to keep him out of the fields. From the context, it also appears that she struck a previous bargain to keep her eldest son Sam from the field as well. Instead, he works in the stables where Tom promises to send James.

Ernestine’s encounter with Tom not only helps the audience imagine the atrocities Black women faced as they were deemed unrapeable but also how some Black women may have negotiated their sexuality within an unjust system. As someone denied personhood by law, Ernestine’s sexual autonomy can only gain her so much. In this case, she wants to spare her children from the demanding physical labor of the field. Yet she understands that working closely under the slaveowners in the house presents its own dangers, particularly when she tells her daughter Rosalee that she is afraid she would be “too pretty.”

However, in the end, Ernestine’s efforts do not spare her children. Upon Rosalee’s escape, Tom breaks his promise and sends James to the field. He also later lynches Sam, the only one of Ernestine’s children he did not sire. Ernestine’s resistance then becomes more explicit when she takes revenge upon Tom by hanging him as he hung her son. Unfortunately, this seems to be Ernestine’s undoing as Tom’s widow places Ernestine on the auction block, another promise to her broken as she ironically no longer has Tom’s “protection.”

Much like Jacobs’ narrative, Ernestine’s subplot places the focus on Black women’s worries and traumas under slavery. While many personal slave narratives focused on men such as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano and Soloman Northup, women such as Jacobs and the fictional Ernestine are left by the wayside. AfroRetroFuturism can see Ernestine as one of the women who found herself seeking to use the system from within even if she saw no prospects of getting out of it herself. Furthermore, it allows the audience to understand how escape was not an option for everyone. Ernestine speaks to the millions of Black women who resisted by continuing to live through the atrocious circumstances of her enslavement, much more like Harriet Jacobs than Harriet Tubman.

Re-imagining the Real

While we can look at Ernestine as a stand in for the likes of Harriet Jacobs, much like Shawl’s Rima Bailey is a composite of Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston, viewers will also soon see a real-life historical figure incorporated into the story: Harriet Tubman. Tubman was introduced in the last episode of the first season as a teaser for the shift in story arc. Interestingly, Tubman’s image has gained pop culture currency for some time and recently culminated into a graphic novel that depicts her as a demon slayer (much like Abraham Lincoln has been imagined as a vampire hunter). However, Underground promises a more realistic depiction of Tubman. This is not to say that there will be no liberties taken with Tubman’s real life, but there may be some speculation of her person that makes her human in the eyes of a contemporary audience and not simply a mythical historical figure.

Furthermore, the addition of Tubman may help Underground achieve something that many do not consider in a historical context: Black women working together as freedom fighters. Tubman’s character comes to the aid of Rosalee who has resolved to return to the South to free more of her people. History portrays Tubman as a lone figure taking all the risks to free more than 300 people. This does not leave much room to consider who might have helped and other Black women who created opportunities to free enslaved people.

Also, as Shawl explains with Everfair, AfroRetroFuturism allows the imagination of possibilities of how historical figures may or may not have responded to the conditions around them. For instance, she never once refers to Leopold with the title “King” in Everfair. This one gesture takes away or at least minimizes the aggrandizement of the ruler and allows the contemporary audience to imagine him as the tyrant many people of the Congo saw during that time. This decenters Leopold but also emphasizes the atrocities committed against the millions who died as well as the survivors.

The AfroRetroFuturism of Everfair and Underground shows that the way we tell stories matters as much as the stories we tell. While Everfair depicts the resistance of a colonial power that still affects the people of the Congo to this day, it also works as an act of resistance in itself as Shawl retrieves the history of a genocide of which many Americans remain oblivious. Even though we are much more aware of American slavery, we still do not tell the full story of those who endured it and perished. The AfroRetroFuturism lens provides the means for stories like Everfair and Underground to refocus the narrative, giving a fuller humanity to Black communities and showing how the past could have been.

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There are some times when people deserve to be named wholly responsible and there are other times when a person does something ill-advised and insensitive, and they therefore become the latest public example of an underlying, ongoing problem.

Andrew Smith is an example of the use of one person as a public example of a larger, systemic problem. In a March 2015 interview with Vice magazine, the award-winning YA author made an unfortunately worded statement about how he was “completely ignorant to all things women and female,” since the first and only girl in his life was his daughter. This was obviously said with snark, since of course Smith is married to a woman and is a high school teacher who does not work at a single-sex school.

He was trying to be funny, though most people would say he failed. However, Vice is a publication with wide readership, and as Smith’s interview reached the masses, the YA community responded. And many bloggers, readers, librarians, and writers used Smith’s statements to point out an issue endemic to YA in particular, but also publishing in general: there’s a gender problem.

Publishing is a field that does not pay particularly well, so it has long been dominated by white women. Overall, white women, more than other demographic groups, traditionally can afford to work for low pay because they are likely to be in dual-income relationships with white men (who are demographically the highest income earners). Literature, though, with a capital L, has long been the domain of deceased white men, and white men’s tastes have long defined the legitimacy of stories, even if they are published by white women.

Children’s and young adult literature, though, has been deemed the domain of women because women are “nurturing,” and because the gatekeepers through which literature is provided to children are parents, teachers, and librarians – all careers that are historically female-dominated. So publishing is a murky place, where (white) women are in charge of (white) men’s vision of the world. When women write the stories, they may choose to publish under pseudonyms or initials in order to appeal to more genders, or they risk being relegated to the lowest of the low – for women, and not just for women, but for young women, and published under the umbrella of “only for young, tasteless plebeians, and on purpose instead of just accidentally being co-opted by whippersnappers.”

It is insulting to imply that a group of people making up 50% of the world’s population are too alien to tackle – even if your job is to explore the world around you and write about it, and even if you are known for having such a wild imagination that giant praying mantises can exist, but not a woman with a personality.

The internet’s subsequent conversation about sexism in YA, while not a new conversation, might have been jumpstarted on that particular day by that particular article, but it was about a topic – sexism – and not a person. It was in essence a writing prompt, not a book report assignment. As Derek Attig of Book Riot noted, “calling someone on participating in and perpetuating a messed-up worldview isn’t attacking them. It’s challenging a status quo that has, through the awful magic of repetition, achieved the false appearance of truth [emphasis mine].” That did not keep people from claiming that the people engaging in this Twitter conversation were “bullies,” however.

Can’t believe the amazing YA writer & tender-hearted Andrew Smith is being vilified for honest comment abt a shortcoming. We all have them.

Sara: I’ve met Andrew Smith on several occasions. I’ve interviewed him, and read several of his books, and feel confident enough to call him a friend. We’re not super close or anything but we’re on first name basis, and I know him well enough to say this…he’s the last person I would call sexist. He’s the last person that I would lump in with white American males, bla bla bla. He’s one of the kindest and funniest people I’ve met, and I’m always happy to talk to him. He’s an incredible writer and storyteller. He has shown nothing but absolute respect for me, and has done nothing but encourage me in my own endeavors to become a writer.

An overwhelming push for politeness is not new; white people have been telling people of color to stop complaining for as long as they’ve been oppressing them, and sexism is a similar insidious system. It’s called tone policing, and it’s what happens when the oppressive class (insert any privileged group of choice) tells the group they disenfranchise (now insert any marginalized group in relation to the privileged group you chose prior) that they’re going about things in the wrong way, that there’s no reason to be so agitated, that if they just changed their tone, certainly everybody would listen to them.

It’s about controlling someone’s outrage in order to maintain power over them, effectively cutting them off and telling them you won’t consider their argument valid until they appeal to your comfort – but, of course, comfort means not having to admit you might be complicit in oppression, so there’s no winning here. Everyday Feminism can break it down for you even more:

Many of the people telling others to “be kind” were from the same group as those who were most vehemently dedicated to fighting the sexism Andrew Smith’s words represented: the face of YA literature and publishing – white women.

Authors Lindsay Smith and Anne Ursu fielded a long conversation just after the #KeepYAKind storm. Read it if you dare. Notice that Wyzlic talks to them as if they are children (“It’s hard, I know…”) and admonishes Ursu and Lindsay Smith to consider the good intentions behind everyone, rather than engaging with the content of their tweets or with the content of the Andrew Smith comments that prompted them.

In other words, the tone policing in the YA community was coming from – and aimed at – the people with nothing to gain from shutting down a conversation on systemic oppression. If that’s not a wacked version of respectability politics, I don’t know what is. Women have been told for so long that we need to quiet down, demure, and be nice that now we do it without being told outright to do so.

Looking at the incident a year later offers us an opportunity to understand how tone policing isn’t just a tool of the oppressive class, but an ultimately self-sustaining system that comes out of internalizing one’s oppression. This is a concept studied by many scholars, notably Paolo Freire, who suggested that in order for this system to work, the oppressed (in this case, women) must unequivocally accept the oppressor’s (men) guidelines for operating in the world so that they feel inherently less than.

Because white men define literary tastes, standards, and “quality” in western society, it’s really not surprising to see women who work in a field defined (if not statistically dominated) by another group trying to uphold that group’s established standards. But it doesn’t get women anywhere. Or any other oppressed groups, for that matter, even as the calls for equity and social justice in YA grow ever harder to ignore louder (diversebooks.org). As writer and publisher Sarah McCarry noted years earlier, “This cult of niceness is at its heart a pernicious kind of misogyny, one enforced almost exclusively by other women….By caving in to an unwritten code of conduct that promotes a false sense of community over honest discourse, we’re not doing ourselves any favors.”

YA is a place where the glass ceiling has chipped, and yet its women are upholding the status quo that made it so hard for them to even get close enough to the ceiling to hit it in the first place. Maybe there are so few men, numerically speaking, because they know women are doing their work for them.

After the Vice interview, Andrew Smith secured his Twitter to approved followers only, called a woman an “asshole,” and eventually made the account public again. The world moved on, because the argument had never been about him. It was about sexism.

But it’s not hard to find more recent examples to see how easily calls against oppression result in an intra-community shushing war, in which the less oppressed members of the group tell the more oppressed (or the loudest allies) to keep it down so they don’t hurt the feelings of the privileged. Even though criticism is not bullying, the YA community has created a space where it is perceived as such – and it keeps it from getting any other work done.

[Note: Within this article, gender identity inclusivity is implied.]

Sarah Hannah Gómez writes, teaches group fitness, sells biotech skincare products, and consults on library- and literature-related matters. She is pursuing a PhD in the history and critical theory of children’s/YA literature. Visit her at shgmclicious.com or on Twitter @shgmclicious